No. 33 - Private Dining at Xiao Ye
Loves a good dinner party
It’s 2001, I’m watching J.Lo in The Wedding Planner orchestrate this beautiful, elaborate wedding for a hyper-wealthy SF couple; through her little headset, she puts out fires, left and right, with grace and always just in the nick of time. Forget the Matthew McConaughey love story, I wanted to be the girl who made shit happen. It’s in that moment that I knew, in my little 11 year old bones, I wanted to be an event planner when I grew up!
Before I switched my career to interior design, I went to hospitality school in hopes of becoming the GM of a Marriott (or whatever, because I heard you get to live in the hotel and thought that was cool lol). And although the main purpose of our program was to get its students into managerial roles in hotels, restaurants, and country clubs- at the time, event management wasn’t a thing you went to school for- we had a decently hefty connection to the events world in LA! From big conventions to anything Wolfgang Puck Catering, as students, we got to volunteer at events all the time. Like Oscar’s after-parties, stuffing swag bags and such. Even at a young age, I knew the traditional routes weren’t going to be it for me. Managing a Hillstone Restaurant wasn’t going to bring me ultimate fulfillment and executing events in a hotel banquet hall wasn’t going to spark joy.
I just knew that I enjoyed curating experiences for people, but I had no idea what that would look like as a career, especially an exciting one. But in hindsight, I’ve danced around this idea of curating experiences throughout my resume: at the tail-end of college, I nabbed an internship at SBE curating dinner parties at suuuper LA restaurants, ones that you’d also find in Miami Beach. Then, working at El Camino Travel, we were curating unique travel itineraries, essentially week-long events for groups of 14 people! Even as young hospitality kids, Louis and his line cook buddies would do pop-up dinners in our little house in DC, while I helped to curate the dinnerscapes. Not to mention allllll the restaurants I’ve ever worked at, where I was curating dining experiences for each of the tables I served.
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